Automatic sensor clustering : connectivity for the internet of things

Abstract: Current predictions from industry envision that within a decade, the Internet will bepopulated by tens of billion of devices. Already today, smart Internet devices havesensors that provide an enormous potential for creating new applications. The chal-lenge at hand is how this information can be shared on the future Internet in order tounlock the full capability of applications to interact with the real world. Therefore,there is an urgent need for scalable and agile support for connecting people, placesand artifacts in applications via a vast number of devices and sensors on the futureInternet. Clearly, this poses a challenge of sharing and thus storage of so-called con-text information. Beyond scalable context storage lays another challenge to identifyand locate devices that are important to the user. In a support for billion of contin-uously changing sensors and actuators, a search engine would not work. Thereforean intelligent way to group devices is required. This thesis deals with mainly three issues: Firstly, propose a method for devicesto be reachable and thus addressable independent of their location in the infrastruc-ture. Secondly, how can the proposed method be used to insure automatic connectiv-ity anywhere between clients and services offered by the device, in particular associ-ated sensors and actuators. Thirdly, how can the grouping and support be combinedand used to dynamically associate sensors from across the Internet with applications,assuming that the aforementioned grouping exists. The proposed solution to the firstissue is to store identifier-locator pairs in an overlay. For the second issue we pro-pose a sensor socket introduced which exploits the identifier/locator pairs to enabledevice mobility. The third issue is addressed by providing a group-cast operation inthe sensor socket. This arrangement allows communication with peers determinedby a grouping algorithm which operates on context information on the context over-lay. Thus we have enabled the creation of automated dynamic clustering of sensorsand actuators in the Internet of Things.The sensor socket is designed as a stand-alone module to support any contextoverlay that provides the same basic functionality. The sensor socket embodiesa support to automatically interconnect and communicate with devices. Using abridging software, remote devices can be dynamically found and inserted into legacylocal area network where current devices can benefit from the connectivity. For fu-ture work the bridge can be extended to actively locate and identify nearby sensorsthat are unable to participate in the overlay network otherwise.